English

When fifteen-year-old Beth Weeks family is attacked by a grizzly, her father becomes increasingly violent, making him a danger to his neighbors, his family, and especially Beth. Meanwhile, several young children from the nearby Indian reservation have gone missing, and Beth fears that something is pursuing her in the bush. But friendship with an Indian girl connects her to a mythology that enriches her landscape; and an unexpected protector shores up her world. Set on an isolated Canadian farm in the midst of World War II, The Cure for Death by Lightning evokes a life at once harshly demanding and rich in sensory pleasures: the deafening chatter of starlings, the sight of thousands of painted turtles crossing a road, the smell of baking that fills the Weekss kitchen. The novel is sprinkled throughout with recipes and remedies from the scrapbook Beths mother keeps, a boon to Beth as she learns to face down her demons--and one of many elements that give The Cure for Death by Lightning its enchanting vitality.

Following the international success of The Cure for Death by Lightning, Gail Anderson-Dargatz has written an extraordinary and beguiling second novel. A "foray backwards in time", A Recipe for Bees is the telling of a woman's life: Augusta Olsen, a farmer's daughter, then a farmer's wife, living in the isolation-- desolation--of rural Canada. Conjuring that landscape and its time, the photos from Anderson-Dargatz's family album scattered throughout the book suggest that this is an obscurely personal narrative, a testimony to the many "strange tales" and the unique loves that lives lived so close to the land can solicit. Sometimes painful, often pitiless--the possibility of a slow death from loneliness and frustration on her husband's farm haunts the young Augusta--A Recipe for Bees is on the side of a visionary bid for life: the resistance and resource which drives Augusta to manufacture love as she manufactures honey, forging pleasure through friendship, family, narrative--and the strange world of bees. "Have I told you the drone's penis snaps off during intercourse with the queen bee?" The memorable opening line of a novel preoccupied by bees, the sensual language of bees, and the difficulty of making life out of death. --Vicky Lebeau

Gail Anderson-Dargatz's third novel recasts the Biblical story of Job in Alberta farm country. Fans of her earlier fiction will relish the familiar mix of ingredients in A Rhinestone Button: the isolated rural upbringing of its main character, the wealth of farming lore, and the lush descriptions of the natural world. Like Beth Weeks (the hero of Anderson-Dargatz's award-winning novel The Cure for Death by Lightning), Job Sunstrum experiences a deep psychic connection to his landscape. The shy young cattle farmer is blessed with the gift of synesthesia: he can see and even feel sound. For Job, the whirling hum of a vacuum cleaner is "an invisible egg with the smooth, cool feel of glass." Too "pretty" to be fully accepted by the ordinary folk of Godsfinger, Job appears content to linger on the fringes of his community, farming the land his abusive father left him, baking his famous almond squares, and communing with the vacuum.

The collapse of Job's tidy world is presaged by the unexpected return home of his brother Jacob, an out-of-work pastor with a sour wife and a troubled son. Suddenly, he's not only banished from his beloved kitchen but struggling to figure out his relationship with everyone from his childhood playmate Will to the attractive waitress at the local café. What Job needs (as even the local nutcase keeps telling him) is a woman. What the sexually confused virgin finds instead is born-again religion in the form of Jacob's charismatic preacher friend, Jack Divine.

Anderson-Dargatz's account of Job's initiation into Pentecostalism is as fascinating as it is funny. Scenes such as Job's inane attempt to speak in tongues and Father Divine's outing of a young gay man have a quirky honesty that make for compelling reading. The novel as a whole, however, suffers from choppy narrative transitions and a certain vacuousness that seems to be an extension of Job's limitations as a character. Angelic though he is, Job is just a little too dim to really care about. --Lisa Alward